Breathe into the Past: Crosscurrents in the Caribbean

The lands that touch the Caribbean Sea have become inextricably intertwined, over the centuries, with the rest of the globe, including parts of Africa, India, China, Japan, Europe, the United States, and elsewhere. The Caribbean’s ecologies, economies, and cultures have been fundamentally shaped by these relationships, which have involved shifting empires and colonization, travels across bodies of water both voluntary and forced, and the bodies of water themselves.

Breathe into the Past: Crosscurrents in the Caribbean takes its title from a line in Alexis Pauline Gumbs’s 2020 book Dub: Finding Ceremony, which is about channeling ancestral knowledge toward understanding Caribbean histories and navigating Caribbean futures. The twelve featured artists in this exhibition hail from the Dominican Republic, Jamaica, Cuba, Haiti, Puerto Rico, Guyana, Trinidad and Tobago, coastal Colombia, and beyond. Their artworks offer insights into the complex histories that have influenced the present—sometimes on grand scales, at other times in subtler yet still undeniable ways. They acknowledge human and nonhuman entanglements, situate contemporary politics in spaces of coloniality and imperialism, and celebrate long histories of resistance and perseverance. They integrate a broad range of materials—vintage saris, codfish skins, bougainvillea thorns, sugar—into sculptures, books, photographs, films, and more, so as to speak to histories of migration and diaspora (the scattering of peoples from their homelands). In this way, the works and the artists who made them offer poetic responses to often-marginalized histories.